"Restless" Makes You Long for Love

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Just when you think great love stories like Casablanca and Harold and Maude are completely extinct, a film like Restless comes along. "Falling in love is a really vulnerable thing. There's so many relationships that don't work out and so few where people stay together forever and truly find their soul mate. So, that makes sense to me, why it's hard to be captured in cinema—it's hard to be captured in real life," said the film's producer, Bryce Dallas Howard.

Howard is stepping behind the camera for the first time to produce Gus Van Sant's latest film, Restless, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival earlier this week. Howard jokes, "Well, you know, when you get pregnant, you can't act." But Howard's involvement with Restless stemmed more from passion than by default.

Longtime friend and fellow NYU Tisch grad, Jason Lew, initially sent Restless to Howard for feedback. "I was immediately moved by it and became obsessed," Howard says. "[Jason and I] did a bunch of experimental theater at NYU together—I call them naked plays, like total exhibitionist plays—so we were clearly very comfortable with one another...but I didn't call him and say, `I want to produce this,' because that would have been outrageous. I had never produced anything."

The pair worked incessantly to develop the young love story and Howard urged Lew to stay true to his personal experience of watching love bloom and fade among his father's teenage oncology patients, and thus, to keep his main characters as teenagers. "I think there is a purity with young love," Howard says. "When you're a teenager—unlike adult relationships where you're dealing with logistics and the more practical matters of life—there is this period of time where you can simply get lost in another person and be completely absorbed in becoming one with another individual and fully experience those feelings without thinking to yourself, `what does all this mean?' and `where are we going to live?' and `do we have the same goals for the future?'"

After two years, Howard caved and took on the official role as producer—also attracting producer Brian Grazer and her father, producer Ron Howard to the project. But the star of The Help and the upcoming cancer comedy, 50/50, didn't produce to land a role. "It's a big job to act in something and it's also a big job to produce something, or direct something, or write something... To say, `oh, I want to play this part', would have possibly derailed what was meant to be for the movie."

Enter Mia Wasikowska and newcomer Henry Hopper. The androgynous starlets are so clearly meant for the roles of Annabel and Enoch, that it's painful to watch as their love does bloom and inevitably fade.

Though you haven't seen Hopper in a film, his face and last name should be familiar. Henry is the only son of legendary actor Dennis Hopper, who died of cancer last year. The 20-year-old Hopper was quietly coping with his father's illness and impending death while in production. "Enoch—Henry's character—is a character that has faced death before and because [Henry] himself was dealing with that, he brought a truthfulness that was very heartbreaking and hard for a lot of us. But he had the courage to bring that and be open to that," Howard said. (The late Hopper, by the way, saw his son's acting debut before passing away.)